The Crowley copying considered in context

In the context of a post about Monica Crowley [ Why plagiarism took down Monica Crowley, Trump’s pick for a top national security post ], one commenter stated


I am conservative and I like Monica, but I hate plagiarism. I had a similar experience when I edited a fellow law student’s law review article. I spent a lot of my precious school time improving his article for him, while he resisted the changes in a more than average way. The editor-in-chief called me in and showed me what the footnote checker had discovered – like Monica’s work, the article was full of paragraph-long stolen passages. No wonder he resisted the edits; I was changing presumably excellent published work. This guy was rich and apparently skillful at working his way out of trouble. He was kicked off of the law review but not out of law school. I still have a bitter taste from it.



The main body of the post did mention Biden's plagiarism at Syracuse Law:


If that wasn't bad enough, Biden admitted the next day that while in law school he had
received an F for a course because he had plagiarized five pages from a published article
in a term paper that he submitted.



The post of Aaron Blake did not mention that the length of the paper (for a 1L class) was 15 pages,
and did not mention that a fellow 1L (reviewing the paper) warned Biden about copying from the
published article, which had been provided to the class for the writing exercise. Biden did get an F,
had to retake the course, but remained in law school, and went on to other things. The copying issue
as to Kinnock is less straightforward as to "plagiarism," with the bigger concern that the
copied "life elements" were not true as to Biden.

The post of Aaron Blake did not mention the plagiarism issue with the Ph.D. thesis of Glen Poshard, one-time governor candidate in Illinois. Poshard had to re-write his thesis but did not lose his Ph.D. The less discussed issue was
how the copied material related to Poshard's thesis and how the thesis committee missed the copying and the illogical presentation.

Of Biden, see


Biden and plagiarism


Went to a garden party: does Joe Biden hide in your shoes?

Of "footnote checker" (cite checker),

the Lemley citations about transistor/hearing aid ultimately track back to a non-existent 1947 article in the
New York Times. Cite checkers in law reviews are imperfect.

See the 2004 post:
Inventors of transistor foresaw only a hearing aid application?